Por si las moscas…
The world is definitely dominated by insects, as we saw last week in relation to lice, bedbugs, ants and the like. So in order to continue our tribute to these six-legged creatures, keep scratching while we talk about fleas.
Pulgas are great little animals. Also known as pulica in Latin (if you happen to speak Latin at home), they have short antennae and long legs which enable them to jump from one dog to another, like in the cartoons. If your dog has fleas, maybe you should feed him more often, because popular wisdom has it that al perro más flaco se le cargan las pulgas, or as Shakespeare may have said at one point: “The skinniest dogs tend to get more than their share of fleas,” meaning that terrible things usually happen to those who are in the worst position to confront them.
Who knows why, but if you — not your dog — only have a few fleas, it means that you are of a generally mean disposition and that you are easily irritated. “No me gusta hablar con Ramiro”, a friend told me recently. “Es de muy pocas pulgas.” (“I don’t like speaking with Ramiro. He [literally speaking] has very few fleas.”) A real translation would be: “He’s extremely irritable.” In English we are accustomed to saying “there are many ways to skin a cat” when trying to express the notion that a certain task can be performed in a large variety of ways. In Spanish we don’t skin cats; we kill fleas: “Hay muchas maneras de matar pulgas.” (“There are many ways to kill fleas.”)
And if you happen to be very short, don’t be surprised if people refer to you as a pulguita. And then there’s the direct translation of “flea market,” commonly used in Mexico: mercado de pulgas. The native word tianguis is much broader: it implies any kind of informal market selling all sorts of wares, usually in open or semi-open places.
There are other interesting flea sayings, although they’re more common in Spain than they are in Mexico. Let’s look at a couple of them anyway. First of all there’s echar a uno la pulga detrás de la oreja, or “to throw a flea behind someone’s ear.” For example, if someone says he heard my wife’s been cheating on me, I could say that this person “me echó la pulga detrás de la oreja”, meaning that the comment was intended to upset me and keep me off balance. If you turn a flea into a camel or an elephant, “hacer de una pulga un camello [o un elefante]”, it means that you only notice other people’s defects. There is another saying along these lines which is very common in Mexico (and just about all Spanish-speaking countries): fijarse en la paja en el ojo ajeno sin ver la viga en el propio, whose literal translation is “to notice [complain about] the straw in other people’s eyes while ignoring the roof beam in one’s own.” In other words, it’s easier to criticize other people’s faults than it is to recognize the home-grown variety. People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Rounding out our insect-ridden articles, we have the fly and the mosquito. First on the list is the unavoidable mosquita muerta (“little dead fly”). A mosquita muerta is someone who appears to be amiable and good natured, but who in reality is ruthless and cunning. TV soap operas are full of this sort of thing.
Next is mosca en leche. If someone dresses up in very poor taste, we say that he or she looks like a “fly in milk.” And if a restaurant has bad food or service, it most likely will be empty most of the time, because allí no se paran ni las moscas; “not even the flies go there.” And speaking of restaurants, if you hear someone refer to la mosca en la sopa, “the fly in the soup,” they are referring to something negative within a broader positive context.
If we do something “just in case…”, in Spanish we do it por si las moscas… The “straight” way of saying “just in case” is por si acaso. And, finally, if someone is acting aggressively for no apparent reason, we could very well ask ¿qué mosco te picó?, suggesting that his or her contentious demeanor is out of place and inappropriate, as if it were due to some kind of mosquito bite and not at all to the people or events at hand.
If you would like to know more about any idiomatic expressions
you may have heard, or about any Spanish-language difficulties,
feel free to contact me at sandrocohen@gmail.com.
And you can check out my blog at: www.sandrocohen.blogspot.com
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